Which country has the fastest Internet?

South Korea is still number one – has fastest Internet speed worldwide

Want to be able to download a DVD worth of data in about 38 minutes? It may not seem very impressive, but that’s with the average Internet speed in South Korea, according to the latest “State of the Internet” report by Akamai.

Covering Q3 2011, the report again puts South Korea at the top of the list of countries with the fastest Internet connections. The country scored an average connection speed of 16.7 Mbps in Q3 2011.

Here’s what it looks like for the top 10 countries, with data going back to Q3 2007. Even though the USA on position 13 falls outside the top 10, we decided to include it for comparison.

The global average connection speed continued to increase in the third quarter of 2011, climbing 4.5% to 2.7 Mbps. If you look at the chart above, you can see that, over the entire period from Q3 2007, all countries enjoyed increasing speeds. Also, all countries have seen average speeds jump up and down between quarters, although the effect is much more noticeable for South Korea.

Overall, Akamai reported that the worldwide average connection speed increased in Q3, up 4.5% to 2.7 Mbps. South Korea saw a growth of over 10% in the quarter. Many other countries also enjoyed a growth during the quarter, including Hong Kong, Japan, Latvia, Switzerland, and the USA.

In total, Akamai noticed increased average speeds for 86 countries, and a decline for 47 countries. Out of the top 10 countries, only Romania saw a decline in the most recent quarter.

We know what you’re thinking, that South Korea rules the average connection speed, but some other country is faster in terms of top speed. We’re sorry to disappoint you, but even in peak connections, South Korea rules, with 46.8 Mbps.

An Internet user’s dream
It would seem like South Korea is somewhat of an Internet user’s dream. The country also enjoys a very high Internet penetration. According to the latest World Bank figures from 2010, 82.5% of South Koreans are online, ranking the country in 11th place worldwide.

We will continue to monitor Internet connection speeds around the world using Akamai and other sources. Will South Korea continue to be number one? We’ll see.

Akamai, a company that collects data about Internet use, says it gets over 1 trillion requests per day to its global server network. It has organized this data into its quarterly "State Of The Internet" report, which examines, among other things, the world's fastest and slowest Internet connections by country.

In order to be included in the report, a country must have made more than 25,000 requests from unique IP addresses in the last quarter. Akamai sets this bar in order to avoid making unfair comparisons between countries with large disparities in population or infrastructure.

Overall, global Internet speed is improving, accoring to Akamai. Between the first and second quarters of 2011, average global connection speed increased 21 percent and is now 2.6 Megabits per second. By comparison, Internet speeds in the United States (the world's 12th-ranked country) look fairly speedy at an average of 5.8 Mbps. However, residents in the country with the fastest Internet (see slideshow) enjoy an average connection speed of 13.8 Mbps, more than twice as fast as the U.S.

Over 80 countries on Akamai's list saw speeds increase by 10 percent or more, and one of the fastest countries, a small Eastern European nation (see slideshow), saw a speed increase of 29 percent. The United States even saw an increase of 26 percent, and that number may continue to increase thanks to the FCC's new broadband regulations, which plan to bring faster Internet to underserved regions of the U.S.

According to The MacObserver, in the U.S. broadband is defined as having speeds of at least 3 Mbps for downloading (from the internet to your computer) and 768 Kbps for uploading (from your computer to the internet).

Interestingly, downloading is usually faster than uploading. According to Huffington Post blogger David Weinberger, of Harvard's Berkman Center For Internet & Society, that's how the cable and telephone companies wanted it. Writes Weinberger, "Their business models assumed the value of the Net came from the content they deliver to us. The business models got written into a physical infrastructure that favors downloads over uploads."

Take a look at the world's top 9 countries with the fastest Internet (below), then check out the fastest U.S. states according to Akamai's recent report.